


Wanderlust

by cygnes



Category: Castle Rock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26452924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: Every so often, the Devil comes out of the woods by Castle Lake. He never comes to stay.Or: Henry Deaver learns about doorways between worlds, and how to open them.
Relationships: Henry Deaver/The Kid | Shawshank Prisoner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: King of Exchanges 2020





	Wanderlust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



> It was a delight to write for your excellent prompts! I took inspiration from your ideas about post-canon fic, plus fic about the Kid not being who or what he claimed. (Also, for a certain loose definition of "road trip" that includes cross-timeline travel, this is kind of a road trip fic?) I didn't tag for Henry/Molly because nothing happens between them in the fic, but there's a little light longing going on. 
> 
> The timeframe for the events of the fic doesn't match up with when the coda takes place, but tbh I don't think the reopening of Shawshank in season 2 does, either, so do with that what you will. I don't know if you've seen season 2, but there are a couple of non-spoilery gestures toward season 2 events in here, and a wink or two at some other King properties.

They go almost a full month without speaking, after Henry puts him back in the cage. 

The first three weeks and five days of visits follow a predictable, unvarying pattern. Henry descends the ladder into the hole with two bags, one looped over each arm: food in one and clothing in the other. The food bag contains two peanut butter sandwiches and a bottle of water. The clothing bag contains the second set of prison-issue sweats that he switches out every day, plus another bottle of water for his prisoner to wash with. Henry doesn’t bring soap; there’s a chance the man in the cage might try to swallow it, to choke or poison himself. His body doesn’t age or decay, and he might not even need to eat, but there’s no saying he couldn’t die other ways if he put his mind to it. 

(Would death bring an end to all this? Henry’s personal burden; the shadow hanging over the town? Or would it just release all the strangeness the man carried with him, _in_ him, back out into the world?)

Those early visits are short and quiet, though not silent. The big metal drum echoes, amplifying small sounds. Sometimes it echoes with sounds Henry hadn’t heard in the first place. Maybe the man in the cage is making the sounds somehow, to fuck with his head. He does that, whether or not he means to: he fucks with people. Increasingly, Henry suspects that he _does_ mean to do it. That it’s been under his control all along, no matter what he claimed or implied.

Though that line of thinking could also just be a rationalization to ease the guilt Henry feels. Six of one, half dozen of the other. It doesn’t change anything.

Henry doesn’t read the bible to the man in the cage because he’s not a sadist. It would be cruel, with the past they share. But by the end of that third week, he’s starting to wonder if the quiet isn’t worse. Maybe that’s why he’s the one to speak. 

“It wouldn’t have worked, you know,” Henry says. The man in the cage says nothing, so he goes on: “Your plan to get back to your own version of Castle Rock. I’ve done some thinking about how it has to work, based on what you told me, and what I know.” 

“How?” the man in the cage says. One word, echoing up the walls and back down in a way Henry’s own voice didn’t seem to. 

“There has to be an act of violence,” Henry says. “Death, or at least the intent to cause it. For me going over to your version of the Rock, it was trying to kill our dad. For you coming over here, it was your Molly dying.” 

“Why wouldn’t it have worked,” the man in the cage says flatly.

“If you killed me, you had no way of opening that door, because I was the one who could hear it. If I killed you, I had no reason to go through that door anyway. There were only two of us.” Henry is pleased with the steadiness of his voice and the soundness of his logic. It doesn’t sound like what it really is, which is the product of sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling and hearing the phantom echoes of the cistern bounce around the inside of his head. 

“That’s good,” the man in the cage says. 

“Good?” Henry repeats.

“Good thinking,” the man in the cage clarifies. “Or it would be, if you had the facts straight.” 

“What did I get wrong?” Henry says. 

“You trusted me,” the man in the cage says, and is silent again. 

Henry sits with that a while, lets it percolate. Five more quiet-but-not-silent days. He knows now that he’s going to have to be the one to talk first. The man in the cage has over twenty years of vengeful patience built up. Henry had that, too, once upon a time, but the long years spent forgetting have eroded it. He doesn’t remember how to be a prisoner. He’s still learning to be a jailer. But maybe one has lent him a knack for the other — the sameness of his days, the solitude of secret-keeping. Castle Rock has started accepting him back into the fold, as much as it ever did, but he’s never going to be seen as one of its native sons in the way he deserves. He doesn’t want that as much as he used to. If he was really welcomed, people would expect him to be warm and open. People might ask him where and how he spends his time. 

Molly would know without asking, which makes him almost glad she left town. _Almost._ She might have known before she went south, and maybe it was part of why she went. They hadn’t discussed it. If she knew, it was because she felt it. Henry doesn’t know what that connection feels like from the other side. It’s like trying to look through mirrored glass from a brightly-lit room: he can only guess.

“So you played me for a fool,” Henry says, when those five days have passed and he has some idea of what he wants to ask. “Why?” 

“You’ve got no reason to believe anything I tell you now,” the man in the cage says, but he creeps forward, curls his fingers through the bars. 

“And you’ve got no reason to think lying will help you,” Henry says. “Right?” 

“It got me where I needed to go,” the man in the cage says. 

“Seems to me like you ended up right back where you started,” Henry says. 

“Seems,” the man in the cage repeats. He draws back a little. “It got me you, though, didn’t it?” 

Despite his first impulse, Henry does not say _what the hell is that supposed to mean?_ Instead, he says “I guess it did.” They sit together in the echoing quiet for a while, and then Henry stands to leave. 

“You can open the door yourself, you know,” the man in the cage says. “All you have to do is let me show you how.” 

“I think I understand how locks work,” Henry says, and his tone is easy, if a little sarcastic. But his heart rate has picked up. He’s trying to pretend this could be an ordinary conversation; he knows it isn’t. 

“Do you?” the man in the cage says. “Death is a door, but so are mirrors. The lake is a mirror.” He stands to his full height, which… maybe shouldn’t fit in the cage, the way he usually hunches, but he manages somehow. “We’re a mirror, too. You and me, together.” In the dark, his eyes shine large and wet. 

“I’m the same as you,” Henry says. “That’s what you’re saying.” 

“Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades,” the man in the cage says. He smiles fleetingly, crookedly. That’s something Alan used to say: _close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades._ The familiarity is stranger now that Henry knows it isn’t real, and that’s not something the man could have picked up just from watching a few home movies, or snooping through a shed. “You take to traveling enough, you see the lives you could have lived. I told you about one of them. It’s how I knew to find you. People like us, we run in parallel sometimes.” 

“Like us,” Henry repeats. They’re becoming each other’s echo in this low, dark place. Maybe that’s what’s been troubling him about the sounds. Maybe the idea of reflection between them isn’t so far-fetched. 

“Let me show you,” the man in the cage says, and fits one long, thin hand through the bars, palm outstretched. Against his better judgment — against any judgment, really — Henry fits their hands together like a handshake.

Henry is underwater. Henry is deep underwater, deep enough that it takes the space of a held breath for him to even know which way is up. His clothes drag against him. Every stroke is a struggle. When he surfaces with a gasp, it’s to the sound of laughter and a night sky with too many stars. He can’t remember hearing the man in the cage laugh before. Though he’s not the man in the cage now; he’s the man in the lake. _A_ man in _a_ lake, non-specific. There are two men in this lake, after all, and neither of them are defined by it. 

“I’ve never been more glad to almost drown,” the stranger calls over the water. 

“Where are we?” Henry says. 

“We’re the sons of Castle Rock,” the stranger says. “Where would we go but Castle Lake?” 

They don’t talk as they swim to shore. Henry loses a shoe somewhere along the way, and his jacket hits the rock with a wet slap when he takes it off. It’s summer here, at this Castle Lake. The heat crawls over him as soon as he gets out of the water. 

“Where are we?” Henry asks again. 

“Castle Lake,” the stranger says. “Too early to say which one, or when. I’d say pre-industrial or post-apocalyptic, based on the sky.” The lack of light pollution, Henry thinks: that’s why the stars are so much clearer. “Christ, I hope this isn’t the one with Captain Trips. That’d send you screaming back where you came from, on your first try.” He’s talking almost like a regular person. That, like the laugh, is unfamiliar.

“You’re going to have to tell me what the hell you’re talking about,” Henry says, because he’s wet and hot and has only a vague idea of what’s going on. And that vague idea is too vast, horrifying in its scope, like the sound in the woods he’s learned to pretend he doesn’t still hear. 

“You have to be careful,” the stranger says. He rakes a hand back through his wet hair, pushing it out of his face. “Or you’ll become a cult leader without even trying. It takes a while to control it. The magnetism. Takes a while to pick your destination on purpose, too, but you’ll get there.” He turns his face to the sky, dense with grains of light like spilled sand. 

“How do I get back?” Henry says. 

“ _That’s_ your question? Already?” The stranger doesn’t look at him. 

“I have a son,” Henry says. 

“He’ll be there when you get back,” the stranger says. “You never end up too far from where you started, once you hit your own version of things.” He looks back over at Henry. His eyes are dark and strange and alien again. “Death isn’t a door you can use more than once, and you might not like where it takes you. Consider it a last resort.” 

“Jesus,” Henry says. 

“Doesn’t have much to do with it, as far as I’ve seen,” the stranger says. “With apologies to the reverend.” He stands and offers Henry a hand up. “Let’s take a walk.” 

The woods hum here, too, but at a lower pitch. The stranger walks ahead, sure-footed and barefoot. Henry follows. After a little while of limping along, gait uneven, he takes off his remaining shoe and throws it into the underbrush. They come out of the woods by his house, which is there after all, but dark, and silent. No streetlights. Not even a candle in the window. But something moves inside, brushing against the curtains. 

“Oh,” the stranger says, sounding disappointed. “The vampire one. Well, it’s still better than the plague.” 

“You said you could control it,” Henry says. He’s trying not to be scared, which means the anger is coming to the fore instead. “That means you brought us here. On purpose.” 

“I’m not the one who opened this door,” the stranger says. “You did. This is all you, Henry.” He gestures down the dark street, loose-limbed. 

“Take me back,” Henry says. “This isn’t _right_.” There’s a hand on the curtain now, with papery skin. It’s a hand he knows. He doesn’t want to see the face that goes with it. He doesn’t know if it would be worse for his mother to recognize him or not. He doesn’t know if she’d still be his mother, or something else entirely. 

“You’re asking a lot here,” the stranger says. For the first time, he sounds annoyed. 

“Are you saying you can’t?” Henry says. The back of his neck prickles. Behind him, the woods hum louder. 

“I’m saying maybe I don’t want to,” the stranger says. “I’m saying maybe I should leave you here and let you figure it out on your own, if you’re going to be ungrateful.” 

“Un —” Henry starts to repeat, disbelieving, and stops short. Enough echoing. “I didn’t ask for this.” 

“You took my hand,” the stranger says. He takes a step toward Henry; Henry holds his ground. “You agreed. And I can’t push you the way I do other people — we’re too much alike.” 

“Is that why Molly —” Henry swallows the thought back down. He doesn’t want to bring her into this. 

“There are different reasons for it,” the stranger says. “But that’s yours.” He corrects himself with a wry smile: “Ours.” The stranger has cast them in his mind as two of a kind, whether or not it’s true. The best way out of this is for Henry to play along until he knows how to get back on his own. The best way out is _through_. 

It might be different, he thinks, if not for Wendell. There’s nothing else for him in Castle Rock. ( _His_ Castle Rock.) If this had been a year or so ago, when he was still just playing at fatherhood on Wendell’s school vacations, even that might not have been enough to tether him. But what they have now is a real relationship, not just going through the motions. More than that, he trusts Castle Rock less than he ever has, now that its strangeness has shown its face to him. Or maybe faces, plural, one of which is still looking at him through the rustling dark of another Castle Rock. 

“Tell me,” the stranger says. “What are you thinking?” 

“I’m thinking we should get out of here,” Henry says, “because I don’t think I want to meet any vampires.” 

“Especially not that one,” the stranger says, tilting his head toward Henry’s mother’s house. The hand still rests on the curtain; it hasn’t been pulled back. “Right?” When Henry doesn’t say anything, he goes on: “You know, sometimes the Rock isn’t close to the Lot at all, but that geography isn’t constant. Sometimes they’re even the same place. And _some_ things…” A smile creeps onto his face and seems to flatten him all the way back out until he’s the strange shadow that lived in the cistern. “Some things repeat.” 

“Uh-huh,” Henry says. His tone falls somewhere between unimpressed and uneasy. It’s hard to find himself in all this. There’s the stinging terror of where he is, and what he can apparently do, blanketing over everything. But underneath that, there’s the bone-deep tiredness that has been eating into him for months. Longer, probably. It’s been weighing on him more since he started staying in one place again. “Are you going to show me how to pick a destination, or just stick around until we get our blood sucked?” 

“You should be so lucky,” the stranger says. His smile turns a little crooked, and he looks like a person again. “And it’s not something you _do_. It’s something you _feel_. You’ll get it on your own, after you do it enough times.” He turns back toward the woods, and the lake beyond.

“Nobody taught you?” Henry says. It’s just a hunch. The stranger stops. 

“I’ve been alone a long time,” he says. 

“But not always,” Henry says. “Right?” 

“Two paths diverge in a yellow wood,” the stranger says, though the woods ahead of them now are green. “You sure that’s the one you want to do down?” 

“There are a lot more paths than that,” Henry says. 

“If you don’t want to do this my way, you can do it alone,” the stranger says, and then.

And _then_.

Henry is standing alone on the end of his old street, facing the summer-green woods in the dark. There was no flash of light or thunderclap. The only difference is that the woods are humming a little louder. Behind him, he hears the creak-bang of a screen door that needs oiling. Alan had kept it in better repair than that, by the time Henry had come back, but he knows that sound from when he was young. The third step down still creaks, too.

He takes off running. 

He stumbles once or twice, but never falls. Without thinking about where he’s going, Henry finds himself on the cliff where he pushed his dad over. The cliff Warden Lacy drove off. Behind him, at the end of the woods, a thin and rasping voice calls his name. 

“Okay,” Henry says. “If anybody’s listening, please help me get somewhere else.” He takes a running leap off the edge and closes his eyes.

The water he hits isn’t crusted over with ice, but it’s a damn sight colder than the water he’d climbed out of a few minutes before. He surfaces to bright, brisk daylight. The trees around the shoreline are red-yellow-brown, and this time he knows for sure that this is Castle Lake. There are still fishing boats on the lake, which means it isn’t October yet, when the open water fishing season ends, and some of the boats have motors on them, which means he can’t be too far in time from where he started out. A few decades, at most, though that’s a harrowing thought on its own. 

Henry’s arms are still tired from his first swim to shore, but he makes it there. He’d lost his coat somewhere along the way — running through the woods, or on the jump itself. He’s down one sock, now, too, so he takes the other one off and puts it in his pocket. He doesn’t like the idea of walking back through the woods barefoot, but if someone sees him wearing just one sock, well. He’s already going to look like a crazy person. No need to push it any further. 

He finds himself wandering back the way he had come through the summer-night woods. The terrain isn’t much different; his feet know where not to step. He’ll get close to a road, he thinks, and try to scope out the makes of the cars to figure out when he is, assuming there’s enough similarity to make an educated guess. 

Only he hardly takes notice of the first car he sees, because he recognizes the driver. 

Molly Strand.

It’s not the car he knew her to drive, but he’s sure it’s her. The certainty gives way pretty quickly. The wavering hope it inspires clings a while longer. It might be worth it to check her parents’ old house, on the off chance she’s staying there rather than the farmhouse she’d bought for herself. Her parents’ house is within walking distance. (So is his mom’s house, but he’s determined not to so much as look at it this time. The summer-night house was enough of a lesson in that.) 

To her credit, Molly doesn’t react too badly to a barefoot, damp man standing on the steps of her parents’ house. She does stare, though, in a way like she’s trying to figure something out. 

“Molly Strand?” he says. She nods. “Do you know me?” She shakes her head. “My name’s Henry Deaver.”

“I knew the Deavers,” she says. His heart clenches at the use of past tense. “I don’t remember Mrs. Deaver too well, since she divorced her husband and moved away when I was still a kid.” He relaxes a little. “The reverend died a couple years back. I sold his house.” She looks over his shoulder, up the hill. Henry turns to look, no longer as afraid of seeing something he doesn’t want to. The lawn is landscaped, as much as a hill that steep can be. The house is painted a serene blue-gray, with deep plum accents. He hardly recognizes it. “You wouldn’t be here looking for a boy, would you?” Molly says, very quietly. Henry turns back to look at her. 

“You find him in the basement?” Henry says. Molly is very pale. She opens the door wider and stands aside. 

“I think you’d better come in,” she says.

The story is almost the same as the one the man in the cage had told, with the exception of the fact that he’s conspicuously absent. It was Molly who’d found the boy in the basement when she was cleaning out the house to get ready to sell it. Alan had called, told her Ruth didn’t care what she did with it or even what happened to the proceeds from the sale. Jackie Torrance was the one Molly had turned to, and Jackie had warned her against going to the police until they’d figured out a little more of what had happened. (That sounded about right. Jackie probably thought she could get a book out of it, or a podcast, at least.) But the boy had run off into the woods. No trace. No proof he’d been there at all, except the tapes the reverend had left, and those weren’t proof of anything except that he’d gone a little crazy after his wife left. Everyone knew that already. 

“Are you his father?” Molly says. She looks up from her clasped hands, where her gaze had fixed toward the end of the story. They’ve settled at the kitchen table.

“You’ve got to bear with me,” Henry says, “because this is going to be hard to believe.” 

“I have plenty of practice believing in unlikely things,” Molly says. 

“I’m him,” Henry says. “Or some version of him. The boy you found. It’s complicated, and I don’t really understand it all myself.” He tries to explain from there. He tells her about herself, since that had seemed to be the stranger’s tactic when he’d lied to her. Lied to them both. It works just as well with the truth. 

“I believe you,” she says. Henry lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “You can stay here for a while, if you need time to figure out how to get back.”

“Thank you,” Henry says. There has to be a better way than jumping in the lake. He only has so much clothing he can lose, after all. “I’ll try not to be a bother.” 

“I’m on the town council,” Molly says with a brave smile. “It takes a lot to get to me.” Something has gotten to her, though. She’s a little more put-together than the Molly he knows, but not as steady or as poised as he’d been led to believe she was in the version of things where she’d died. Maybe losing a kid you found in a basement will do that to a person. 

It’s not surprising, given that edge of fragility, that she’s single here, too, and there isn’t anyone living with her to question the addition of a stranger to the household. Henry still has his wallet, and his driver’s license is intact, which means he shouldn’t have too much trouble unless someone tries to run it and realizes he has no records. He goes into town. Molly introduces him as a friend from college, come to visit, thinking about buying some property in the area. Dennis Zalewski’s alive, and a sheriff’s deputy. He’s friendly enough with Molly — seems to know her from her town council work. His daughter’s name is Jenny. His daughter’s name is Jenny, and she has a father who’s alive to look after her. Things here seem… better. If not for Wendell, he’d be tempted to stay.

It’s almost normal. For about a week. Then the first fight breaks out. 

Henry is in line at the grocery store, picking up a few things for Molly. He tries to help her out in the ways he can — running errands, mostly. He forgot to check that he had enough cash, and it’s not like he can use his cards. (He hasn’t even seen anyone with a Mastercard here. Maybe the company is called something else, or maybe it just doesn’t exist.) He’s trying to figure out what to leave behind, and he’s embarrassed, and annoyed, and —

Behind him, the sound of flesh striking flesh. He turns to look, and a man his own age is tearing into a woman in her sixties. She’s giving as good as she gets, clawing at his face with fingernails manicured salmon pink. There’s shouting, and people trying to break them apart. Henry leaves all the groceries on the conveyor belt and walks out of the store. He knows what’s happening, even if he doesn’t want to believe it.

It happens again, at the pharmacy. Henry stays indoors and there’s a six-car pileup on the county road outside town. Molly doesn’t say as much, but he knows she’s thinking about his father’s tapes. The accidents. The tide of the town’s luck turning agan. 

Mirrors, the stranger had said. He should try that. He’s already lingering too long. He thinks about kissing Molly goodbye, knowing that she’s the only person he can approach without danger, and she’s as lonely as he is. He doesn’t, though. It wouldn’t be fair to her. It isn’t fair even to want it.

“I’ve got to get back,” Henry says to his reflection in the bathroom. It’s late at night. The buzz of the lightbulb overhead sounds like a tinny, muted version of the forest’s hum. But it was never the forest, was it? It was something else. Just easiest to hear there. He presses his hand to his reflection’s hand. The face looking back at him twists into an ugly, alien smile, crueler than his own face knows how to be. 

Then he’s standing on the road. In the middle of the road, in fact, with a truck blaring its horn. He runs to the side of the road with a few seconds to spare and takes stock. Recent model truck. The sign up ahead is for the turn-off into Castle Rock. He follows the road into town. At the gas station, he goes inside, and Charlie greets him by name. The relief is overwhelming. He calls Wendell, says his phone got lost. 

He nearly cries when he hears his son’s voice. He’s only been gone overnight. 

Henry stays put after that. Months go by. He doesn’t miss going to the prison, where the cage now sits empty, but he doesn’t know what to do about the lack left behind, without a vocation to keep him going alongside the occupation that pays the bills. It means he has no cause to stay in Castle Rock. He can’t see his way to leaving, either. 

A year on from when he’d put the stranger back in the cage, Henry wakes to a knock at the front door in the dead of night. He’s not entirely surprised to see the stranger on his porch. 

“I have an appointment to keep soon,” the stranger says. “Over in the Lot. You might want to see about taking a vacation, taking your son and getting out of town for a little while.”

“Is somebody going to get hurt?” Henry says. He’s thinking about the six-car pileup, and a woman with iron-gray hair and a bloody nose baring her teeth like an animal in Hannaford’s. 

“Not you,” the stranger says. It sounds like a promise. They sit on the top step, side by side. Time passes; Henry couldn’t say how much. Time turns strange when they’re together. It always has, he thinks. He just hadn’t wanted to notice it before.

“Were you there?” Henry says. “Down in the hole, all that time? Or did you just come back so he’d see you?” 

“I was there,” the man says. “There are only so many ways to open a door. I didn’t have any.” 

“And now you have me,” Henry says. “So you don’t need the lake, if you’ve got your mirror.” 

“Is that a promise?” the man says. He smiles one of the smiles that makes him look human. Henry isn’t sure if he still is; he doesn’t know if traveling so much, and for so long, changes you into something else. Eventually, he’ll probably find out. 

“I’m not saying you can come and scoop me up whenever you want,” Henry says. “I have a life.” 

“A life with one good thing in it,” the man says. 

“You lay a hand on my son and you can forget the whole thing,” Henry says sharply. He thinks: _two good things, maybe_ but he knows it isn’t true. The chance that Molly Strand — his version of her, the one he grew up with — will come back to Castle Rock for him is slim to none. If he wants her, he’ll have to go wandering again and find another version who doesn’t know him well enough to distrust him. 

The man holds up his hands in surrender. “I got it, I got it,” he says. “But someday he’s not going to need you like he does now. And then what’s keeping you there.” 

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Henry says. And he trusts they will: hand in hand, most likely.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [plutonianshores](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutonianshores) for looking this over on short notice.


End file.
